The new dirty words in medicine are ones no one would have expected 30 or 40 years ago. Lead, mercury, and aluminum all seemed harmless enough back then. It just goes to show you how much times can change–and how much we have to learn. But now that we do know the dangers of heavy metals, more of us are concerned with not only avoiding them in the future but also eliminating any build-up we’ve already accumulated.

Last April the word “privacy” lost all meaning. That was when the so-called federal Medical Privacy regulations went into effect. I won’t go into detail on these regulations here, since I covered them at length last year, but suffice it to say your medical records are anything but private these days.

When I was a medical student at the University of Michigan in the 1960s–back in the “Dark Ages,” as my children like to say–I worked briefly with a very experienced older physician, whom I’ll just call Dr. X. The craze for prescribing horse estrogens and synthetic estrogens was just getting started, but he’d already learned an important point about them. As he wrote these prescriptions out, he’d automatically write a second prescription for a small quantity of thyroid, too. He did this without running any thyroid tests at all, which all of my medical school professors said was very bad practice.

In just the last two weeks at the Tahoma Clinic, two of my female patients have shown some remarkable progress. One woman’s bone scan report showed a 4.1 percent improvement in spinal bone density, and a 7.1 percent improvement in hip bone density compared to a year ago. The other woman had a 4 percent improvement in both hip and spinal bone density in just 10 months. The only change they’d made since their last scans was adding the mineral strontium to their existing bone-health programs.

Damage control. That basically sums up what’s been going on in the world of HRT since the summer of 2002, when news of the canceled Women’s Health Initiative study broke. Mainstream doctors and researchers have been scrambling to clean up the mess they made after years of prescribing dangerous synthetic hormones and horse hormones to thousands of women. I’ve been doing my own version of damage control, too-explaining to my patients and to you the difference between real, bio-identical estrogens and the synthetic versions that caused so many problems. But now that things have quieted down somewhat on the estrogen front, it looks as if there’s controversy brewing about testosterone-again.

Q: I have multiple sclerosis. When I read about the research concerning estriol treatment for MS, I decided to try it. I thought I’d let you know how I’m doing so far.

Q: I read your article slamming congressional attempts to preserve drug benefits for federal retired employees, when the Medicare drug “benefits” bill passes, in the [November] issue of Nutrition & Healing. As a federal retiree it did not set too well with me.

IN THIS ISSUE: The best male anti-aging tool the “experts” don’t want you to have; One small change could eliminate your risk of osteoporosis altogether; Bring your HRT program out of the “Dark Ages”; Another chance for REAL medical privacy; Spring cleaning for your body: Herbs to help with heavy metal detoxification; Federal retirees and prescription pampering: An inside point of view; Success with MS, the estriol way